CSER Projects >> Migration, Evolution and Transformation

Migration, Evolution and Transformation of Software (MET)

Principal Investigators

  • Mike Godfrey
  • Ric Holt
  • Andrew Malton

Goals and Activities of MET

The MET project, which is a cooperative effort between IBM and the University of Waterloo, is centered around software change, in particular, around migration, evolution, and transformation. These closely related concepts can be briefly characterized as follows:

  • Migration is changing existing software to a new language, dialect, or platform; the focus is on semantics-preserving translation at the level of the source code.
  • Evolutionis incremental change over a period of years; we are particularly interested in the patterns of these changes, which may be explicitly planned or which may result from drift due to successive, uncoordinated updates.
  • Transformation is explicit, planned change of software. At the high levels, we are interested in transformation of the software architecture; at the low level, we are interested in code-based changes such as widths of data fields. Transformation may or may not change the semantics of the software system.

The aim of the MET project is to improve the state-of-the-art in understanding, managing, and effecting change to large industrial software systems. The end product will be a body of knowledge and set of accompanying tools that will allow industrial software developers to lower the risks and costs involved in maintaining long-lived software systems. This project involves the formulation of theories and the design of abstractions concerning how software is migrated, evolved, and transformed. These are validated by the design of supporting tools and the detailed study of large industrial software systems such as DB/2.

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